info @ the P.Pole 02.01.07

I'm currently blogging to you guys from my Windows Vista Ultimate (partitioned with XP) Firefox. I've been fooling around with Vista all day long and I've got some preliminary feedback on it.
Firstly, I don't want to come off as fanboyish, since, well, though I've never thoroughly used anything other than Windows for my day-to-day computing needs (I did have a brief Linux stint way back when my dad liked to play with that stuff), I use computers enough to spot stupid programming/design (like when I have to terminate and restart explorer.exe every time I want to see a registry change take effect in my taskbar). I'm not overly tech savvy but I think I know my ways around a computer. Anyway, I thought XP's defaults were ugly and navigation was boring. From a purely aesthetic POV, XP was quite bland. Vista's default settings, on the other hand, are quite pretty looking and it runs quite smoothly on my machine.
I've yet to run into any errors while just trying to get the hang of the OS, and I suppose that's a good sign. Did I mention how I also had a brief experimental period before with OS X Tiger? Well I did, and I found that Vista's got quite a few similar features... as I'm sure the more nerdy of my readers have already heard about from various geek blogs (Gizmodo, anyone?). Really, the "gadgets" sidebar, the program search field in the start menu, the window switching application: this all reeks of smart ideas on Apple's part and smart business by Microsoft.
Nevertheless, it's looking good and I'm not going to hate on it just yet. For now, Vista, you're on my "kinda cool but slightly rip off" list. I do have one complaint, however, and it's that Vista refuses to play my House episodes (or any other video files I've got loaded on my drives). I'm guessing that this is that dreaded copyright protection crap that was tattooed into the OS, so I'll be patiently awaiting someone to crack this... Unless it's already been done. Guess what I'll be Googling for the next little while.

EDIT:
Firstly, thanks to Herm for pointing out that it might be missing codecs (I feel retarded now). I hadn't thought that my father had not installed the necessary codecs when installing Vista (yes, I let him take care of it because I was too busy entertaining my lady friend, or maybe because I've not had to set up an OS in awhile). Now that I've found and installed the necessary codecs, House plays wonderfully.
Secondly, after a little bit more Vista-ing, well, the OS is lovely. It was lagging before and I couldn't figure out why. That's when I decided on grabbing CCleaner again and installing it on my Vista partition. I ran it, cleared 100+ megabytes of trash and deleted 60+ obsolete/useless registry keys. I also ran the disk defragger on my drives and cleared up more trash. Then I cleaned up a gigabyte of hibernation system files (useless) and that cleaned up even more trash off my drives. Now it's running swimmingly and with no lag. Sweet deal.
Lastly, I reinstalled my usual apps and reconfigured everything. I actually had to reconfigure Firefox twice (takes a long time if you run a lot of extensions like me) because my dad wiped my configuration the first time when tweaking the Vista after the first day. I would've just copied my settings over from my Windows XP application data for Firefox (like I did with Gaim) but that turned out to not work as nicely as I'd have liked (Vista uses three separate folders to do what XP's "Application Data" did). Dumb. Either way, I'm slowly integrating my needed apps into Vista (installing as I find the need for them so I avoid installing an ass-load of stuff I don't actually use).